Cold enough for you? Try these short stories to turn up the heat as winter draws in … ‘Butterflies of the Balkans’ Jo Lloyd, author of the collection The Earth Thy Great Exchequer Lies, thinks of the short story as a huge thing contained in a small space – like a poem or a TARDIS
It’s been a crazy six months for me – but poetry helped. The editors of the NOTHEME XI issue of the online poetry journal Cordite, Emily Stewart and Eloise Grills say it better. They write that, ‘in this post-not-really pandemic juncture’ they remembered, most of all, ‘How much we need the work of poetry and its sublime, strange
COVID-lockdown limited my walking but reading about walking (beyond my 5-kilometre-from-home boundary) kept me on track. River wander … The River gives you the sense you’re walking beside a beautiful river with someone who knows it as their friend. Johnny Warrkatja Malibirr is a Yolnu man from the Gonalbingu clan and his drawings of the
I read SO many good books this year … but here are some highlights to inspire your holiday reading. The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams – Sparked by the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary, this wonderful tale explores missing words and the lives women lived between the lines. As Esme discovers: language shapes
A breathing place is what poetry offered me in the back half of 2021. Sydney was in lockdown for many months – again – and it was easy to be restless. Easy for anxiety to stagger your breath. Poetry gave me different cadences to hook into. Some of which I’ve sampled here. I make my
COVID restrictions have robbed many of us of our chance to get outdoors and into mysterious places to see wild and wonderful creatures in their element. Next best … read about them. Myth and mystery I’m a reluctant seafarer but love the Hebrides and Philip Marsden writes mesmerically of skippering a wooden sailboat up the
The sea has circled me in my reading – through whorls of beauty like Lucía Estrada’s ‘jellyfish, wide-open’ in ‘Medusa’ and Tristan Tzara’s ‘tender water of sleep offered around’ (see below). The ocean is in the poems I’ve explored but also in the novels and non-fiction I’ve been reading. I am thirsty for the sea’s
Here are five things that lifted and lengthened me during lockdown, and in the months since. Bloomin‘ bird “It must be weird to have wings, and not be able to fly.” Penguin Bloom (the movie) is a tear jerker. Naomi Watts plays a devastating Sam Bloom, mother of three, who becomes paralysed from the chest
Stuck for what to read on your Summer break? Browse my top 15 Summer of 2020 reading suggestions to pin it down. This is Happiness by Niall Williams – What a novel! It plaits warmth and wisdom with depth and humour. “Father Coffey, the curate … pale and thin as a Communion wafer.” Laugh and
This was a year in which poetry really had to do its fine work – and it did. These are the poems that most soothed and stirred me most in the latter half of 2020. ‘Short talk on the Mona Lisa’ by Anne Carson Every day he poured his question into her, as / you
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